This book is an encyclopedia of emotions, a comprehensive analysis of the major emotions
and the known methods for understanding and handling of emotions, both on an individual basis
and in a clinical setting. I acquired this book for my library as I was beginning my work with
Doyle P. Henderson on his novel theory of emotions (see PANACEA! review elsewhere in this
volume).

Nothing in this book could lead one to Doyle's theory, but this book is filled with data on
the paltry level which our knowledge of emotions and their control has reached, up until now. The
authors say in their Final Thoughts chapter that:

To a great extent biology shapes the emotional reaction to the personal
meaning we construe from a situation.

This statement shows that nothing changed much in thoughts since the beginning of the
book, where on page 9 they state:

Finally, if we understand the personal meanings that underlie our own
emotions, we will be in a better position to accept these emotions in ourselves,
control them so that they do not interfere with our relationships with those we
care about, and be more skillful in managing our lives. Facilitating this
understanding is the basic goal of this book.

In many places in the text the authors try to draw us into a universal theory of emotions, i.
e., that human beings develop emotions the same way they develop arms, kidneys, and eyes: from
a generalized biological urge in their genes. If we accept such a universal theory, we would expect
that person A's anger would be similar to person B's anger just like their kidneys are similar.

Yet, on page 15 in the first detailed case study, the authors state clearly, "Another person
with a different personal and marital history might not have made the same appraisal . . ." Instead
of helping the person to recover the pieces of individual personal history that would him to convert
an involuntary response from his past into a conceptualized memory, the authors suggest that if he
created a competing goal "preserving the relationship", then the anger would not have occurred or
would have been milder. This approach clearly shows the authors' colors as cognitive therapists,
who "consider distressing and dysfunctional emotions the result of the personal meaning
constructed about negative events."

I don't know about you, gentle Reader, but this human has never encountered a distressing
emotion that was due to some constructed meaning. What I have noticed is that I might construct a
meaning about a distressing emotion after the fact, and those constructed meanings are obviously
grist for the mill of cognitive therapists. But the emotion came first, not as the result of the later
constructed meaning. Who could construct meaning in the absence of an event?

Notwithstanding that, cognitive therapists do help people to construct new meanings and
thereby find relief. All without either therapist or client ever understanding the individual personal
basis of emotions, which exists prior to their constructed meanings. Doyle P. Henderson developed
his theory outside the field of therapy and postulates that the primitive body states originate from
events occurring to us between conception and about five years old. Combinations of these
primitive body states are what we call emotions. These childhood events are stored as primitive
body states because the conceptualization apparatus of the body/brain has not matured at the time.
When it later matures, around the age of 5 years old, future events are stored as conceptual
memories, not primitive body states anymore. When, as an adult, one re-members or re-lives the
event of the stored primitive body state, it is re-stored as a new conceptual memory, and the
automatic triggering of the primitive body state is disabled, defused, disconnected, erased forever.

Thus we see that distressing emotions come from the automatic re-triggering of primitive
body states, after which we may construct personal meanings, not before, as cognitive therapists
would have us believe. Contrary to the statement on page 199 -- "the purpose of this chapter is to
suggest that there is no emotion without thought or reason . . ." -- we find, via Henderson's theory,
that emotions begin one has an as yet undeveloped conceptual apparatus, one that is incapable of
either thought or reason.

In its attempt to indoctrinate its readers into the field of cognitive therapy, the book goes
astray from its main goal of being a compendium of the emotions. This goal it achieves quite well,
which makes the book a valuable map of the field of emotional control (except for the salient
omission of Henderson's theory).

The chapter Emotions and Health is very useful in understanding the effects of negative
and positive emotions on health. From page 242:

Some of the hormones secreted in the presence of stress emotions impair or weaken
the immune process by reducing the available number of disease-fighting components, such
as lymphocytes (white cells), thereby leaving us more vulnerable to infection.

Through this chapter I was able to understand how the onset of a common illness like a
cold or the flu can generate or trigger stored primitive body states (negative emotions or stress)
that would depress the immune system exactly at the time the immune system should be kicking
into high gear to create white blood cells to fight off the illness. It would be like starting up a sharp
incline in your car, and just when more gas is need by the engine, the carburetor would give it less.
One would not be surprised that the car slowed to a complete stop under such conditions. And that
is what can happen to a human when, in the presence of stress reactions, the immune system is
depressed at the onset of an illness.

When the next definitive exposition of Making Sense of Our Emotions is written in the 21st
century, one can expect it will devote much of its space to
doyletics -- the new science of emotions
based on Doyle Henderson's theory -- and that cognitive therapy will be a footnote to history along
with leeches, phlogiston, and whale oil lamps.

~^~ Over One Million Good Readers A Year as of 2004 ~^~

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